The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953

The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953

Robert Dallek

Language: English

Pages: 307

ISBN: 0061628662

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

"Robert Dallek brings to this majestic work a profound understanding of history, a deep engagement in foreign policy, and a lifetime of studying leadership. The story of what went wrong during the postwar period…has never been more intelligently explored." —Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Team of Rivals

Robert Dalleck follows his bestselling Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 with this masterful account of the crucial period that shaped the postwar world. As the Obama Administration struggles to define its strategy for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dallek's critical and compelling look at Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and other world leaders in the wake of World War II not only offers important historical perspective but provides timely insight on America's course into the future.

resist any Moscow scheme to make West as well as East Germany part of its postwar empire. First, however, he tried to forestall a Soviet reach for German domination by disabusing them of malign U.S. intentions. In a Chicago speech, a week before traveling to London, Marshall scolded Moscow for its “calculated campaign of vilification and distortion of American motives in foreign affairs.” There was no truth whatsoever to charges of “imperialistic design[s], aggressive purposes, and … a desire to

“We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!” Yet for all the adulation, MacArthur’s championship of a wider, decisive war fell flat. Privately, White House aides belittled MacAr-thur’s self-importance and appetite for public drama with gallows humor: they suggested that the general should have led a parade to the capital riding on an elephant, and that a proper sequel to his congressional address should have been the burning of the Constitution, the lynching of Secretary

“The Americans are not capable of waging a large-scale war at all…. All of their strength lies in air power and the atom bomb…. America cannot defeat little Korea…. Americans are merchants. Every American soldier is a speculator, occupied with buying and selling…. It’s been already two years and USA has still not subdued little Korea. What kind of strength is that? … They are pinning their hopes on the atom bomb and air power. But one cannot win a war with that. One needs infantry, and they don’t

ill-advised strategy for a wider war with China and, if necessary, a showdown with Soviet Russia, he became the object of a renewed right-wing campaign of vilification. Mao cannot be seen as any wiser than Truman or the Koreans for having entered the conflict. China’s battlefield casualties were horrendous—more than a million—and the war delayed badly needed investments in the domestic economy to raise the country’s miserably low standard of living. The alternative of a Korea under United